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Friday, September 26, 2008

Jane Smiley at the Tempe Center for the Arts

Tomorrow, 27 September, will see Pulitzer-Prize winning author Jane Smiley at the Tempe Center for the Arts as part of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing's Distinguished Visiting Writer Series. The reading and book signing will begin at 7:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Which means, yes, be there early to see this fantastic writer!

Jane Smiley has written every kind of novel -- mystery, comedy, historical fiction, etc. Written wrenching family sagas and books where horses talk. She has won a Pulitzer Prize and been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and had two movies (A Thousand Acres and Secret Lives of Dentists) adapted from her work. So who better to offer a magical, surprising, honest look at the role of literature than Jane Smiley? Jane has been praised as “a diverse and masterly writer” (New York Times Book Review) and “one of the premier novelists of her generation, possessed of a mastery of the craft and an uncompromising vision that grows more powerful with each book” (Washington Post). From a retelling of King Lear in her Pulitzer winning A Thousand Acres, to the pitch perfect academic satire of Moo, to fourteenth-century Scandinavia in The Greenlanders, to the world of thoroughbred horseracing in Horse Heaven to her riveting send-up of Hollywood, Ten Days in the Hills, it’s no wonder Time magazine once asked the question: “Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?” Jane offers a very personal exploration of the pleasures of reading; why a novel succeeds—or doesn’t; and how the form has changed over time. Inviting the audience into her own life and career, she delves into the character of the novelist and reveals how (and which) novels have affected her own life.